Studio711

Most of us don’t have to think too long to identify someone in our lives in the military. Jim Beam (from whom I recevived Red Stag in December) has a new program called “Salute Soldiers with the Spirit of America.” If you’re over the age of 21, you can nominate a military friend or family member until June 21 by heading to jimbeam.com or facebook.com/jimbeam. Grand Prize winners will attend one of a variety of prestigious sporting events or concerts. More info is available on their website. Head on over to nominate the service members in your life!

Last weekend, the weather cooperated (no rain) enough for us to have our engagement photo session. This is an opportunity for us to get to know our wedding photographer a bit better and have a test run in hopes of removing a little stress from the wedding day. We met down by the Kirkland waterfront where we had a lot of our first dates.

Logan was nice enough to bring Oskar down for a few minutes and we succeeded in getting a few shots with him. After that, Tyla and I walked around the waterfront and piers while our photographer made some suggestions and snapped a lot of pictures. A lot. He took over 600 photos that in less than an hour!

He had looked through them all, touched up some of his favorites and burned them onto a DVD for us in just three days! I’ve put a couple in this post, but I’ve also uploaded my 25 favorites to the photo gallery. Note that these are significantly compressed versions of the original 12 megapixel pictures. We have full rights to distribute and print these photos so if anyone wants to print some off, let me know and I’ll send you the originals. (Yes, I know our parents are probably the only ones addressed by that last sentence.)

PS. We plan to post a full list of all the vendors, but our default is to wait until after the wedding to give any of those recommendations. So far we’ve been very happy with all our choices!

I’m finishing up the editing for blog volumes 2008 and 2009. The technical process is pretty quick because I have a tool that does the following:

• Connect to the database behind the blog.
• Pull down each post and figure out which categories it belongs to.
• Append the post to an HTML file.
• Load the single HTML file for the whole year into Word.
• Apply a custom style to do 90% of the formatting.
• Do a similar process for the moblog pictures and Twitter posts.

From there, it’s a lot of manual steps:

• Convert all the pictures to grayscale (done with a macro I wrote)
• Make sure pictures are the right size. Sometimes this means making the page-wide images just a bit smaller to fit more than one on a page.
• All hyperlinks get a footnote on the page listing out the URL, but sometimes I’ll print the full URL as the text for the hyperlink in the post. I go through and manually remove the footnotes in those situations.
• Check page breaks and reformat where possible to give a better layout.
• Spelling and grammar check.

I debated for quite a while about the spelling and grammar check. This isn’t meant to be a literary work but rather a view of my life as I saw it at that time, and if I wrote with errors, shouldn’t I include them? I decided to fix everything except the Twitter updates. I hate seeing all those mistakes and seeing them in print is even worse. It’s amazing how many errors you guys let slide without making fun of me. Thank you.

Most of the time, the errors are just typos, but I do make on grammatical error fairly often: “more ____” vs adding “-er.” For example, which is correct: “riskier” or “more risky”? There are many pages on the web to cover this topic, but I have yet to find a quick answer. Maybe there isn’t one. Or maybe you teachers can help me out. For now, I take solace in the fact that many mistakes I thought I was making turn out to be correct after all.

I’m still very happy with lulu.com for publishing. 2008 is going to be about 700 pages long and it will cost me less than $30 to get a hardcover printed copy of it. I find that amazing!

I know these last few months have been hard for you without any NASCAR to watch. Luckily, the short offseason is just about over. The Bud Shootout is this Saturday at 8pm eastern. Practice and qualifying starts on Thursday. The actual season starts the following Sunday (Valentine’s Day) with the Daytona 500.

It’s a great event but we’re forced to hear endless comparisons calling the race “the SuperBowl of NASCAR.” I hate that. Why don’t we call the SuperBowl “the Daytona 500 of the NFL?” NASCAR fans can be desperate for the validation and national recognition that the attendance and viewership numbers demand, but comparisons like this make you sound needy. Stand on your own. Be proud of your event and let the cards fall where they may.

Besides, I think it’s a ridiculous comparison. While it is one of the most prestigious races, it doesn’t compare at all to the SuperBowl’s importance to the overall season. Lose the SuperBowl and you lose the championship. Lose the Daytona 500 and you can easily come back to win the championship. It’s even arguable whether or not it’s the most prestigious. There are some racers who would much rather win the Brickyard 500 than the Daytona 500.

There are a number of changes this year. Most notably, NASCAR is loosening up it’s enforcement of on-track violations. Restrictor places are bigger and there are no bump drafting rules anymore. Have at it boys!

However, I’m disappointed that they still haven’t changed one thing: the number of Sprint Cup regulars who compete in the Nationwide events. I want to see a rule that limits Sprint Cup regulars to 10 races in the Nationwide series. Yes, it’s good for the Nationwide guys to get a chance to learn from the big boys, but is anyone really impressed when the big boys win all the races and the championship in the minor leagues? It hurts the Nationwide series and limits the number of spots available for new drivers. Kyle Busch, I’m looking at you. Give it a rest and focus on the Sprint Cup. You could obviously put the extra time to good use there considering you didn’t even make the chase last year.

After spending about four years with my Harmony Xbox Remote, I have upgraded to a brand new Harmony One. The first remote served me very well, even when I had the complicated TV/projector/receiver/ReplayTV/cable box/DVD setup in Jersey. However, it was starting to show it’s age. Some of the most used buttons were either really hard to press or didn’t work at all. With Tyla moving in after the wedding, I need a single remote that “just works” so that I don’t overwhelm her with my geeky setup.

Enter the Harmony One and it’s beautiful color touchscreen. Programming the new remote was incredibly simple. I connected it via USB to my computer, fired up the Logitech software, and clicked “Replace Remote.” It transferred all the settings from my old remote to the new remote. Done.

Here are the improvements in the new model versus the old model:

• There is now a charging dock. The remote never gets lost because it’s always in the dock and I won’t have to replace the batteries anymore.
• The color touch screen is put to good use. Whenever you want to program a button that doesn’t have a physical counterpart, you can create a virtual button on the touch screen. These buttons are specific to whatever activity you are performing (Tivo, BluRay, etc.)
• When watching Tivo, I have told it my favorite stations and downloaded the corresponding station icons. The remote presents me with a visual list of the channel logos for my favorite stations.
• I can now program in specific sequences. I haven’t used this feature yet but I can see it being useful for more complicated setups that I will hopefully have in the future.
• All of the buttons are the hard, clicker style buttons instead of the soft mushy buttons. The tactile feedback is much better to let you know that you’ve actually clicked the button.
• Despite the touch screen, I think the remote looks less intimidating. There are fewer buttons and every button is backlit so it’s easy to view in the dark.

The main reason these remotes are so handy is that you don’t have to explain to anyone that when you want to watch Tivo you have to set the TV to HDMI2 and turn the AV Receiver to HDMI input 1. It just works. The remote can control up to 15 different devices so even for a very complicated scenario, any activity comes down to a single button push.

So yes, it’s an expensive remote, but if you have anything more complicated than a TV + cable box, you’ll probably understand the value. At one point, I replaced 6 different remotes with one Harmony remote. Bravo, Logitech!

I’ve been pretty hard on Favre for basically everything since his first retirement. So when I ran across this quote, I wanted to post it, but given my past, it will probably come off as more Favre bashing. In an attempt to just present you with the data, I give you this quote with no potential explanations (although I at least a few exist on both sides of the argument.) Feel free to comment with your thoughts.

In two of his last four postseason appearances, Favre threw two of the most unthinkable playoff interceptions in NFL history, both in overtime -- to Brian Dawkins of the Philadelphia Eagles in 2003 and to Corey Webster of the New York Giants in January of 2008. In fact, Favre is the only quarterback in NFL history to throw... overtime interceptions in two playoff games. In his last nine playoff games, Favre threw 18 interceptions.

There’s a lot more where that came from in Sal Paolantonio’s article on ESPN.com.

Tivo has a nice feature called Tivo Suggestions. It tracks the kind of shows you watch and then, when nothing else is being recorded, it will record other shows that you might like. Now that the golf season is starting up, it’s recording all of the PGA Tour events even though I have cancelled my Season Pass. I feel bad deleting them all and marking them with a thumbs down. Maybe Tivo needs a natural language processor so I could explain my actions:

Hi Tivo. Thanks for recording all my shows. You do a wonderful job but your customer service department is terrible. I don’t hold that against you though. You’re just a box trying to please me. And that’s what we need to talk about. Lately you’ve been recording PGA Tour events for me as suggested shows. Last year, I would really have appreciated that. I watched the PGA Tour regularly. But you see, it’s different now. Tiger isn’t playing. Didn’t you notice that when I watched golf I would fast forward to only watch when Tiger was playing? Now that he’s not playing, I’m not interested. So what happens when he comes back? I don’t know. I feel like I’ll probably try to watch again, but I’m afraid that golf will end up in a similar situation to baseball. The athletes I looked up to let me down and ruined the games for me. If Tiger really is repentant, maybe I’ll be able to come back to the sport. At least he wasn’t juicing like those baseball players. So Tivo, while I appreciate your efforts, please stop recording the golf shows for now.